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Why I Love DDM, Episode 1

One challenge to spending my time over at DDM Guild is the fact that most folks there play the Revised Edition of DDM almost exclusively, with only a couple of folks who said they play the occasional game of Original Edition. I had to look at myself today and ask if the reason I won’t play DDM RE is because I’m stubborn, whether I really feel the OE game is better, or some other reason (As of this moment, I don’t have an answer). As I was downloading some ancient DDM files from WoTC tonight, I ran across several old websites (and I only looked at a couple, though there were more than a few)…some had broken links, but some were still alive even after all these years. Not alive in the sense they post new things like I do, but live in the fact that the site was still up. And it struck me that in the 6 weeks I’ve been searching for old DDM sites, I haven’t found many sites that show the same kind of devotion to RE…in the same period of time I’ve stumbled across dozens and dozens of old Original Edition sites…I think its funny that the ‘official’ version of DDM is the same one that caused a large percentage of the player base to just stop playing, while the ‘popular’ version of DDM is relegated to 2nd tier status.

I won’t harp too much on that, you can read more of my craziness regarding DDM Guild, RE and OE over at DDM Guild if you like…what I really want to showcase in WILDDM (Why I Love DDM) each episode is an old website, what I think of it, and maybe talk about one or two of the posts. I’ll do this as a filler type of article, as I think the sites can stand on their own, and if you like you should spend some time exploring them.

Tonight I offer up The Miniatures War College, by Danno Ferrin. Based on his Google page, he is currently working at Oracle and still has a D&D alias under his alternate names; so with hope he still finds time to game! The best part of many of his posts is he has worked out statistical models for many aspects of DDM. (I am guessing he might be an engineer) For example, this post talks about ‘Functional Hit Points’, a concept I’ve thought about quite a bit, but one I never named or actively tried to rate minis on. Just tonight before I came online, I was thinking about ‘Fearless’ in terms of the survivability of a creature. While Fearless is a great ability, it usually comes on minis without a lot of HP, such as undead. There are some exceptions (constructs for example), and that is the cool part of being able to rank figures by their stats based on more than ‘just the numbers’. For example, at the time of his writing that article, the creature with the most Functional Hit Points was the Large Silver Dragon. If I had the wherewithal, I’d love to take the math and come up with a FHP model per point of miniature, as while the LSD has 240 Functional HP, it also costs 122 points! (I take that back, he did that exact thing here!) That way, just like he did with his Functional Damage model, one could compare the ‘competitive’ miniatures of the time to their Functional stats.

If there are folks doing this type of analysis for RE DDM, please point me to them, as I’m not completely opposed to playing RE, I just haven’t seen the great love for the game as I still see in these old blogs for OE DDM.